A high-level assembler in

computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ...

is an assembler for

assembly language In computing, assembly language (alternatively assembler language or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence bet ...

that incorporate features found in a

high-level programming language A high-level programming language is a programming language with strong Abstraction (computer science), abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language ''elements'', be ea ...

. The earliest high-level assembler was probably Burroughs' Executive Systems Problem Oriented Language (ESPOL) in about 1960, which provided an

ALGOL ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...

-like syntax around explicitly-specified Burroughs

B5000 The Burroughs Large Systems Group produced a family of large 48-bit mainframes using stack machine instruction sets with dense syllables.E.g., 12-bit syllables for B5000, 8-bit syllables for B6500 The first machine in the family was the B5000 i ...

machine instructions. This was followed by

Niklaus Wirth Niklaus Emil Wirth ( IPA: ) (15 February 1934 – 1 January 2024) was a Swiss computer scientist. He designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Tu ...

's PL360 in 1968; this replicated the Burroughs facilities, with which he was familiar, on an IBM

System/360 The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. System/360 was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applicati ...

. More recent high-level assemblers are

Borland Borland Software Corporation was a computing technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad, and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was developing and selling software development and software deployment products. B ...

's Turbo Assembler (TASM),

Netwide Assembler The Netwide Assembler (NASM) is an assembler and disassembler for the Intel x86 architecture. It can be used to write 16-bit, 32-bit (IA-32) and 64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are ...

(NASM),

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

's Macro Assembler (MASM),

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

's High Level Assembler (HLASM) for

z/Architecture z/Architecture, initially and briefly called ESA Modal Extensions (ESAME), is IBM's 64-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architecture, implemented by its mainframe computers. IBM introduced its first z/Architecture ...

systems, Alessandro Ghignola's Linoleum, X# used in Cosmos and Ziron. High-level assemblers typically provide instructions that directly assemble one-to-one into low-level

machine code In computer programming, machine code is computer code consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). For conventional binary computers, machine code is the binaryOn nonb ...

as in any assembler, plus control statements such as IF, WHILE, REPEAT...UNTIL, and FOR, macros, and other enhancements. This allows the use of high-level control statement abstractions wherever maximal speed or minimal space is not essential; low-level statements that assemble directly to machine code can be used to produce the fastest or shortest code. The end result is assembly

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

that is far more readable than standard assembly code while preserving the efficiency inherent with using assembly language. High-level assemblers generally provide information-hiding facilities and the ability to call functions and procedures using a high-level-like syntax (i.e., the assembler automatically produces code to push parameters on the

call stack In computer science, a call stack is a Stack (abstract data type), stack data structure that stores information about the active subroutines and block (programming), inline blocks of a computer program. This type of stack is also known as an exe ...

rather than the programmer having to manually write the code to do this). High-level assemblers also provide data abstractions normally found in high-level languages. Examples include:

data structure In computer science, a data structure is a data organization and storage format that is usually chosen for Efficiency, efficient Data access, access to data. More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships amo ...

s, unions, classes, and sets. Some high-level assemblers (e.g.,

TASM Turbo Assembler (TASM) is an assembler for software development published by Borland in 1989. It runs on and produces code for 16- or 32-bit x86 MS-DOS and compatibles for Microsoft Windows. It can be used with Borland's other language produ ...

and High Level Assembly (HLA)) support

object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of '' objects''. Objects can contain data (called fields, attributes or properties) and have actions they can perform (called procedures or methods and impl ...

References

*

https://www.scribd.com/doc/7326575/Assembly-Language] (xiv+294+4 pages) (NB. Presents definitions and examples of older high-level assemblers.) *

External links

* ''HAL70 '', Hamish Dewarbr>
A high level assembly language for Interdata series 70 mini-computers.
Webster site with information and links on HLA and assembler
Assemblers, *High-level {{comp-sci-stub